In Always Great, Awards Insider speaks with Hollywood’s greatest undersung actors in career-spanning conversations. In this installment, Leslie Bibb talks how her delicious role in the buzzy Palm Royale, not to mention her upcoming stint in The White Lotus, feels like payoff after a long career of ups and downs.

Leslie Bibb has gotten used to lulls in her line of work. But for a few days last Thanksgiving, exciting career prospects seemed to be coming together a little too quickly. She’d just finished filming a juicy role on the starry Kristen Wiig period dramedy, Palm Royale; landed in Savannah as part of the ensemble of Clint Eastwood’s next movie, Juror No. 2; and had been informed that she had an audition to tape for The White Lotus season three. “I’m like, ‘I’m shooting all week, there’s just no time,’” Bibb recalls. “And they’re like, ‘Well, it’s got to get done!’”

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Her partner Sam Rockwell had flown to Georgia to visit her and his best friend, Juror costar Chris Messina, and the trio went about cobbling something together on her day off. Bibb put on her Juror No. 2 costume and asked the makeup artist for materials. (“I’m so bad at my own makeup. I put lipstick on my eyes for eyeliner.”) She went from the set to Messina’s hotel room, where he filmed her while Rockwell read opposite her. She sent off the tape, and a week later, she heard back: “‘Mike picked you.’”

Now as we speak, she’s a week out from flying to Asia to complete filming on the Mike White–helmed HBO series. “It’s wild. I usually get, like, ‘You’re going to shoot in Mobile, Alabama, or Albuquerque, or Toronto,’” Bibb says. “I don’t get Thailand!”

Which isn’t to say she hasn’t made an impression over her nearly 30-year screen career. Since moving to New York after winning a modeling contest as a teenager in the ’90s, Bibb has carved out an impressively varied résumé. Her best work was typically found in projects that weren’t widely seen, or in smaller parts that couldn’t break through the surrounding noise. With Palm Royale and The White Lotus, the equation is starting to change.

“I’ve got really good hiking boots and a walking stick, and I just keep going,” Bibb says. “I’m here for the long haul, but it’s not about talent. It’s not, and that’s the shitty thing about this business: The best person doesn’t always get the job. It’s where luck and preparation meet. So I always make sure I’m prepared, and then I hope that the winds are in my sails just a little bit. It feels, lately, like they have been.”

Bibb first got into acting via beauty commercials. Casting directors started figuring out that the model from Bismarck, North Dakota, was pretty funny. One spot for Lee Jeans required Bibb to improvise. “I didn’t know what improv was! The whole concept was, ‘Lee Jeans will make you look like a model, just don’t think like one,’ so I had to make fun of models,” she says. She booked the job, then started getting auditions for film and TV. “When you’d go to LA back then, you would have five or six auditions a day, just driving around,” Bibb says. There wasn’t much of a method until she started taking classes and honing her technique. To this day, she still regularly takes and audits courses.

Bibb’s big break came in the WB’s Popular (1999-2001), Ryan Murphy’s first TV show. Bibb played Brooke McQueen, the blonde high school cheerleader who best embodied the series’ title. The role was a perfect fit for Bibb’s particular on-camera swagger, a mask of prim confidence that’s gradually peeled back with a combination of vulnerability, warmth, and darkly comic precision. But given the series’ tricky tonal balance—imagine Murphy’s style on network TV in the 1990s—it never emerged as a runaway hit. “We were flying by the seat of our pants,” Bibb says.

The show was canceled after two seasons, leaving Bibb in a strange haze. “We were just dumb kids who had a job and were excited to be shooting 22 episodes and have money in the bank,” she says. “We all took it for granted. You’re 24 and you think everything’s going to happen for you. And then you realize, ‘Oh, yeah. This business is hard—and it’s onto the next.’”

The next few years felt like her first lull—a grind of finding work and making it sing. She learned lessons in that period that shaped how she’s navigated Hollywood. “I was just talking to this friend of mine—she’s like 28, she’s been working since she was 14, and she’s having one of those weird lulls,” Bibb says. “I said, ‘You’re not building the stamina to make it through the 18-hour days and not see your family and shoot on location. You’re building the stamina to make it when the business suddenly says, ‘Not you. Her.’”

Bibb learned to spend time on her craft in between making ends meet. “I’m not classically trained. I don’t know diddly-squat about fucking Hamlet. But I went and did [a class],” she says. “It was fun and terrifying. I chose a Hamlet soliloquy—and did that!”

There may not be a direct line from Hamlet to Talladega Nights, but Bibb brings the same rigor and spike to every role that excites her. When preparing to read for Adam McKay’s racing comedy, starring Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, Bibb had a very specific take on Carley Bobby, the brash woman caught between the men. “I felt like Carley was the star of her own country love song,” she says. “And Holly Madison from The Girls Next Door always wore pearls, and it just made me laugh.”

After she got a callback for a read with Ferrell, Bibb was so nervous that she sat in a yoga pose with her legs up on the wall as the casting director called her in. She brought a beer bottle and wore a gaudy pearl necklace, Madison-style. McKay asked about it, and Bibb responded in character: “Oh, that’s what her mama said made a lady.’” She got the part.

Talladega Nights was a commercial smash, and Bibb held her own against Ferrell and Reilly. She remembers filming one scene on outdoor bleachers beside Reilly, nervously holding in a need to go to the bathroom. “I’m like, ‘Whatever you need me to do, I’ll get a bladder infection, who cares?’” she says now with a laugh. “John looked at me and he’s like, ‘What’s wrong?’ I said, ‘I have to pee.’ And he goes, ‘Go to the bathroom. You can’t be funny if you have to go to the bathroom.’ He was right.”

But even with that film’s success, “It wasn’t like somebody was like, ‘I’m going to put her in the lead,’” Bibb says. Instead she’s chugged along. She scored a plum role as a reporter in Iron Man, which was beefed up after costar Gwyneth Paltrow got injured. (“I’m sorry it happened to Gwyneth, but I’m grateful that that happened for me!”) She brought more of that razor-sharp mean-girl bite to the lead role of GCB, a short-lived ABC sitcom also featuring Kristin Chenoweth that proved a bit too acidic for 2012-era network audiences. She shined in smaller indies like Don Verdean and, I’m told, Hell Baby, which Rockwell—who’s in the background for much of our Zoom—tells me I should watch ASAP. “She’s great in that,” he says, unpacking groceries as Bibb smiles quietly.

So while it’s not as though Bibb ever went away, it remains a joy to watch her on a scale she’s rarely afforded. Palm Royale introduces itself as a kind of classic Kristen Wiig vehicle, with the Oscar nominee portraying a buffoonish outsider attempting to infiltrate an exclusive Palm Beach resort circa 1969. But Bibb’s presence, as the socialite hot shot vying to shake up the club’s hierarchy, thrillingly shifts the star-power balance. Her occasionally vindictive, less occasionally empathetic social climber is like her Popular character all grown up, chewing on great one-liners while developing a rich inner life.

Bibb also happens to look the part. “I’d never done wigs and periods like that,” she says. “And I like this character so much. She’s kind of a mess. She’s a little bit of a snake. She might bite you. She’s holding on by a thread. She’s looking for a sense of community.” You see all of that in the performance.

At the show’s Los Angeles premiere earlier this month, worlds collided for Bibb. There was Carly Pope, her Popular bestie with whom she’s remained close for 25 years. There was Jessica Elbaum, Will Ferrell’s assistant on Talladega Nights (she now runs a production company with him). Back then, Elbaum told Bibb that she loved her on Popular. That night, she approached Bibb and said, “Finally! It took you 17 years to get me to meet Brooke and Sam” (referring to Bibb and Pope’s Popular characters).

Bibb gets a bit lost in the memory of that party as we wrap—the pink carpet, the dinner she snuck away to with her close friends, the pride in her work on the show. “I don’t know, it’s so fucking cool,” Bibb says, a bit at a loss for words. “I just feel like it’s all pretty cool right now. I wish I was more eloquent about it. I just know that I’m trying to enjoy this.”